Paul and Romans. Part 1
Edwin Clarke
Sunday, 25 July 2023
Men were promised that if they went to the lunch that Yvonne hosts on the first Tuesday of
the month every effort would be made to talk about cars and DIY stuff instead of high
fashion and brilliant grandchildren. The last couple of times I have been I was somewhat
startled but also delighted that my main topic of conversation was St Paul. On the first
occasion it was about the difficulty of the book of Romans and on the second I was told in the
strongest possible terms that St Paul is boring.
Is St Paul boring? Never! He is one of the most interesting and stimulating writers you could
come across, though I admit, that with 2000 years separating us it is sometimes hard for
modern people to see where he is going. Part of the blame for that must lie in the way we
read the Bible. We get tiny doses of Bible each Sunday from the lectionary. Thus we are
reading Romans at the moment, and throughout this year generally we will read our gospel
from Matthew. But we only get little bits, and those little bits we read don’t allow the big
picture to emerge. Maybe you remember the late, disgraced Rolf Harris of sordid shame. He
put a few dabs of paint here and there on a big white sheet, and it turned from a puzzlement
into a big picture. In church we don’t get to see the big pictures painted in the Bible book just
two or three daubs on a canvas; imagine if you were given a couple of spoons of sultanas, a
pinch of salt, some flour and a wee bit of baking powder and half a glass of milk. Is it for a
scone, a fruit cake, or a self-saucing pudding? Or could it be that the half glass of milk has
escaped from the Cadbury’s factory. No wonder we think Paul boring if we never hear or
understand the story he tells.
So this morning because those conversations about Paul and the lectionary reading from
Romans blend together I am going to talk to you about Paul and about Romans in particular.
Romans is actually not all that hard, especially if you begin from the bottom up. For, you see,
Paul is writing to the church in Rome - to people he had never met in a place he had never
been, unlike those other churches to whom he wrote letters. But going to Rome was on his
bucket list, something to do before he died. If going to Rome was currently over his horizon,
writing to Rome was not, so he writes this letter to introduce himself to the Christians there.
It is just as you might do if you were applying for another job, or if you were a minister
wanting to connect with another parish. You might write a summary of your life story, your
education, you might demonstrate how you can set goals and achieve them, and are just the
one to get results. Paul does none of that. He writes only his beliefs. You see, we ought to
approach Romans as we would a showcase or a shop window in which Paul puts his theology
on display. When we read Romans, we should think Michael Hill Jewellers who are good at
showcases.
Curiously enough, when I look at the showcase that is Romans it contains nothing
particularly hard or even strange. The first half of Romans is about sin, the next quarter is
about salvation, and the last quarter about service. Sin, salvation and service, these are the
three things you will find in Paul’s showcase. Out of these three things Paul will construct a
big picture, just as you, quite likely, will have done already as you have put together your
own theology over the course of years. But as our lectionary passage this morning comes
from Romans 6 from out of the first half, the sin half, you will get only the first of his great
themes: sin.
It may be, too, that you will sense why Paul puts sin first of all into the showcase when you
hear the first couple of verses of our reading. Should we continue in sin that grace may
abound? In other words, since sin is fundamentally God’s problem to sort and fix, shall we
leave it to God and go on our merry way? By no means, says Paul. μη γενοιτο is the Greek
phrase he wrote, which has the connotation of being horror struck, total dismay, the sinking
feeling you have when you come out of church and find all four tyres of your car are flat, in
other words the kind of thing you never want to happen. And that is sin in a nutshell: the kind
of thing we never want to happen. But the reality is that it does. Some people think Paul is
too much into sin, and it is true that he spends a lot of energy contemplating the harm it does,
but always for Paul it comes back to this: sin makes happen the very things we don’t want to
happen, so μη γενοιτο, God forbid.
Paul leaves out of Romans a great deal of his personal life story, he would say it doesn’t
belong in the showcase. But we do know he was a devout and ardent Pharisee. The early
years of his life shaped and formed his faith as they do for all of us, and that raises the
question, was there anything in Pharisaism that shaped Paul’s faith. Sin is in, the Pharisees
were keen on sin as we know from the gospel story. And though it is not as obvious the belief
in uncleanliness is the Pharisaic twin to sin. Paul would have been brought up in all the ways to counter
uncleanliness. Uncleanliness for the Pharisee is not a matter of hygiene or of dirt, not a
grubby mark that comes out with Persil, but it is the limitation of being mortal, of being less
than and different from God. Death, touching a dead body, makes people unclean because
death is of humanity not of divinity. Women with periods or in childbirth are unclean because
mortals have to replenish the race, divinity doesn’t propagate. There is no moral fault or
failing in being unclean, it is just the way it is, a fundamental blemish upon us for being less.
Uncleanness is a way of marking the boundary between the sacred and the secular, it is not
evil or bad. Anglicans and Catholics retain a concept of uncleanness around the sacrament,
especially when the sacrament is understood as the real presence of Christ. The real presence
demands we enclose it in a monstrance, separate it, protect it from the taint of the profane,
keep it in special vessels, handled by special people, or as moderns would say: give it due
respect.
Now it is in this context of thinking deeply about humanity separated from divinity
highlighted by the ritual practice of uncleanliness that Paul shapes his doctrine of sin because
the places where we fall into sin are the very places where our mortality throws up barriers
and boundaries. We get tired and don’t think straight, and our weariness makes us self-
centred. We become afraid that we may be pushed off our rung on the ladder of life; but we
ourselves would like to go three or four rungs up on the ladder of life where life appears to be
more comfortable and secure, and we end up being jealous or greedy or out of sorts, and so it
goes on. For God made us in God’s own image which means that we long for more, much
more than mortality can ever give, and in the process sin is born. The young brother doesn’t
want to be a dogsbody to his older brother and the farm can only have one boss, so was it
wrong to take his money and run? But what does he say to his father when he comes back
home? Father, I have sinned... He has forced his way over the boundary line not because he
wanted to do a bad thing but because he wanted more, which is what humans do, it is exactly
this wanting more which makes us pull the apple from the tree.
This kind of sin, born out of our mortality, realised at the interfaces of our human existence is
in us all. That is why Paul wrote that all have sinned, for all of us are tired, afraid, anxious,
ambitious, hesitant, craving for a transcendence of which we are incapable. We live out of
the limitations of our body, mind and soul. So when Paul puts sin in his showcase he is really
saying to the Romans, let’s talk about our world and face up to the mess it gets itself into, and
the way that despite ourselves things go wrong. This is one of the essential themes of human
conversation. And despite our not wanting to talk about sin, which we might say is boring,
the world’s greatest art and literature and poetry are about what it is to be human, and what it
is that drives us to be more than human. O wretch that I am, who shall deliver me from the
body of this death?
When it is my turn next month we will be in the next section of Romans, the salvation
section, and we can see what Paul will put in his showcase. In the meantime you might like to
do some homework, do it when the TV ads come on and there are those three or four minutes
when you have muted the sound and have a little empty space to fill.
Question 1: Has there ever been a time when your humanness, tiredness, grief, fear, anxiety
turned you away from a good outcome?
Question 2: See if you can find an answer to the problem and predicament of sin, so firmly
embedded in human life?
And lastly, a reminder of my text for the day: Paul’s showcase: Sin. Salvation. Service.
